Archive for: last.fm
There’s a whole host of music streaming solutions out there now; Last.FM, Spotify, SeeqPod, SongBird. All of them trying to carve out a little niche in the rapidly changing online music market. Any new player in the market has really got to stand out in terms of content and user experience if it hopes to get any kind of traction.
So how does Muzzic differ from it’s competitors, and how does it hope to gain users’ loyalty? They’ve got the content issue fairly well covered; their program crawls YouTube’s catalogue, logging all the songs by title and artist. The search seems pretty comprehensive – even odd little things like Kutiman’s Thru You series, and Swede Mason’s hilarious oddities are recognised.
There’s also a little sidebar to browse user’s upload channels by genre – this is pretty limited though, and there’s no way of knowing what you’re going to find in one particular person’s upload list. They work fairly well as mini radio stations or preset playlists though. You can build your own playlists, a single track at a time, or pick tracks to play from your search results. Muziic’s player also brings down the video for whatever you might be watching and plays it in a tiny little window next to the progress bar.
So is it any good? It’s better than last.fm for the fact that you can pick your own specific tracks, rather than have to listen to something like what you had in mind, but essentially it’s like a miniature version of a YouTube quicklist, nothing massively innovative, and more limited than SongBird in that it only draws down from YouTube – a massive catalogue, granted, but not compared to pulling down tracks from the whole web, especially now YouTube has vowed to take down all the content from PRS artists. Not having any audio ads is nice, but the playlist management is so much more comprehensive and cool on Spotify that I’d bear Roberta whining on at me, as well as their more limited catalogue for the privilige of playing through my search results and not having to add tracks to a list one at a time. There’s no music discovery functionality, and worst of all, the tracks occasionally just stop playing for no reason.
All in all a nice try, and probably worth experimenting with before you go back to Spotify.
Im spending a lot of time in the office recently and I’m one of those people who cant work without music playing really loud in the background. I’m sure its not just me who thinks better when music is playing loud, so I thought I would put together a quick list of the top 10 free music streaming service that are currently available. Some of these services can only be used in specific countries, but I’m sure this will change in 2009.
Pandora – Pandora is now just a USA based service. However, Pandora is a great service for those in the USA and im surprised if most people in the USA don’t already use it. Pandora is basically a music radio service which lets you listen to customised radio stations.
Last.fm – I have never really understood Last.fm myself, but they have a great service in which will let you stream music from certain artists. Some have full tracks for free to stream, but others have videos or some nothing at all.
Seeqpod – Seeqpod is basically Google for music. Seepqod is a search engine that allows users to find whatever music they want to listen too. Seeqpod can only find music that can easily be downloaded on the net, so it can be limited with some artists, plus sometimes the tracks might be corrupted and not completely work. However, it is great for making playlists.
Spotify – Spotify is a new music service that has launched out of Sweden. I have been using Spotify for several months now, even though it is in private beta testing. Though the music is streamed, it is played instantly and is partly supported by the famous P2P technology. Currently the service is only available in Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and UK. Spotify has to be the best music streaming service I have used in 2008.
Myspace Music – Myspace is of course the worlds largest social network and Myspace Music is just an add-on of this social network. With Myspace Music users can search for pretty much any artist in the world and stream the music they have on their profiles. Remember it is limited to only the music the artist wants you to hear.
Rhapsody – Rhapsody has a nice “listen FREE” search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. Once you find the artist you are looking for then you can play any of the songs in their catalogue for free. However, then I realised streaming is only for the USA.
Imeem – Imeem is a mixture between music streaming service and social network. On Imeem to stream music all you need to do is to search for the artist you want to listen to and then the majority of the time they will already have an Imeem account.
Deezer - Deezer is a mixture between Seeqpod and Imeem. Deezer has some social networking aspects but mainly it is just a great music streaming service that is very easy to find the music you are looking for. All music on there is legal and free and artists actually get royalties from your streams.
Skreemr - Skreemr is very similar to Seepqod and it is just basically a search engine for music online. Skreemr is a free service that picks up free music from across the internet and allows you to play it easily. However, unlike Seeqpod they don’t allow users to make playlists.
Lala – Lala is one of the new music streaming services on the block. Lala provides free streaming to only USA users. There is a limit on how many times you can listen to a track for free, but you also have the option of purchasing that stream for $0.10 so then you have can unlimited plays. Additionally, if you want to take the tracks off the site then there is an option of $0.79 for the download.
Yahoo’s woes have been smeared across every form of tradtional media as well as every news site on the net. Starting with their slump in stock value, their lack of management, their massive cuts due to the economy, and their on again/off again courtship with prospective buyers. Yahoo has gone through its fair share of hard times, much like any other company has been through this strained economy.
The services that Yahoo offers currently seem almost lackluster when compared the number of simliar Web 2.0 applications that exist that no only compete with Yahoo’s offering, but are better on many levels. Yahoo’s email service and search service had a revamp earlier this year, some services were let go, similar to what AOL was also doing earlier this year.
LaunchCast Re-Launching
Those services that Yahoo has not cut, more often than not, they have been outsourced to other companies. Currently their subscription music service was relayed to Rhapsody music service to continue it’s music playback offerings.
Now Yahoo is looking at relaunching its LaunchCast service through CBS Radio
. AOL made a similar deal earlier this year to ease the burden of cost on the company. According to TechCrunch, “CBS provides streaming fo
r 144 owned radio stations, as well as providing some Internet-only content.” With this kind of backing it would make good business sense to relay some of the burden on the company and offset it with this partnership that will at least help continue the brands music offerings.
This partnership further extends to the marketing and advertising for LauchCast. CBS Radio will now take over all the ad sales, now being in control over offering placements for video and audio displays on the site. This transition looks to take place in early 2009, so fans of LaunchCast should have something to look forward to in the new year.
A Worthwhile Service?
I can’t reiterate enough how great of a move it was for Yahoo to offload the previously company maintained service onto CBS Radio. But I still can’t wrap my head around people who use the service and find it more valuable then the top services on the internet that offer the same if not better. I’m talking about Last.fm and Pandora.
Both of the above mentioned services offer users the ability to build their profiles and their listening preferences based on artists and genre of the user’s choice. The services will then continue to play the music that the algorithm believes you will like best. Sound simple enough, but when you add the social aspect to it by being able to share, connect, and see what others are listening to, the services are hard to beat.
I wish Yahoo luck with their re-launch, but I see services like this and AOL’s service quickly shrinking away into obscurity.
What’s your take on these services, and what do you see happening in the near future? Does anyone out there use LaunchCast? I’d especially like to hear your thoughts.
Spotify, founded by the former Tradedoubler team, is understood to have raised €15.3m from Northzone Venture Partners at a monster €71.6m pre-money valuation. The service is still in private beta.
The Stockholm-based Spotify can essentially be summed up, in the words of one blogger, as a kind of hybrid of Skype, last.fm, the iTunes Store and Bittorrent. A lightweight iTunes-like application streams songs via encrypted P2P technology. The service is ad-financed, hence the comparison with Last.fm.
Spotify has the same look and feel as iTunes, but it basically just a huge library in which allows users to stream albums and tracks as much as they want. Im not sure how they are going to include the advertising part of the business, because it is currently missing from the design. However, they have a great design and this could be a tool that is going to be used a lot in the future, but only as long as they get the monetization part of the business correct.
There has been a lot in the last few days about the announcement by Last.fm about there new business model. Their business model has moved from 30 second clips of songs to full length streams. This however has a restriction of only 3 streams per song per artist. This is a major negative point with the new business model, because once you really get into a song I know I tend to play mine 10 times a day. All these announcements came on the back end of Last.fm signing content agreements will all four major labels.
Artists will be monetized by these streams through the advertising revenue made by the site. I know for a long time Imeem has been attempting to do exactly the same business model and they have had a great deal of success with this. Imeem now has all four major labels signed up and they are making a great deal of money off of the advertising model. Last.fm has also announced that their new revenue model is not exclusive to only the major labels, and anyone on Last.fm can now opt-in and stream their full music for very low royalties.
This all being said I would have really like to see Last.fm slightly change their model. I dont see why there is a limit on the amount of streams per song, unless they have an additional model that allows members to sign up at an additional fee to be able to play the song unlimited times. It is also good to see that Last.fm has partnered with 7digital to offer the music downloads, however a long term solution for Last.fm must be to kill this partnership and enter the download market independently, this might even be a threat to iTunes!
I am still not convinved by Last.fm. The have a great piece of technology in the scrobbler, but I dont think their professionalism on that software has carried over to the site, monetization options and also profile and social network strategy.
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